About the Institute for InterGroup Understanding

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding exists to help create intergroup Peace. We need to intellectually overcome our more negative and damaging instinctive behaviors. We instinctively divide the world into "Us" and "Them" — and we react very differently to "Us" versus how we react to "Them." We protect, defend, accept, and support “Us” — and we dislike, distrust, attack, and damage “Them.”

Those instincts have great power in shaping our lives. They have had paramount impact on our history — causing us to 'become who we are' and 'do what we do,' in ways we rarely understand. Understanding those instincts gives us great power over them. We need that power over those instincts, and we need it now, to create Peace in our world.

Our Mission

Teach people how to take advantage and build on the best features of being “Us” — and prevent the worst features of being “Them” — in every setting in America. Our mission is to help every child in America receive the full benefits of early childhood support so that all groups can prosper, and realize the American Dream.

Our Philosophy

Make enlightened, ethical, informed, and accountable decisions within our own lives, our InterGroup and interpersonal interactions with other people, and everywhere within the world around us. Knowledge is Power. Knowing 'who' we are enables accountable actions, and allows us to use that knowledge as a tool and an intellectual understanding.

We believe understanding what our newborn children need in their first years of life — to achieve safe and productive lives — creates a collective and ethical obligation for all of us to help each child from every ethnic, economic, cultural, and racial group in America.